Thinks 2069

The Archive of Incorrect AI Predictions. “For seventy years, prominent researchers, executives, and public intellectuals have offered specific dates for the arrival of artificial general intelligence, superintelligence, the technological singularity, and the collapse of large parts of the labour market. This archive collects those forecasts: both those the calendar has already refuted, and those still open but on the record.”

WSJ: “Polling has faced a variety of challenges as technology changes the way people communicate. Building a random sample of voters—considered a gold-standard methodology—and reaching them by phone with live interviewers has become harder and far more expensive as fewer people answer the phone. Hesitancy to take polls has risen. And cheaper methods, such asking people online to opt in to surveys, carry high risk for error.”

Bret Stephens: “The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age.” What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought. It compels thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can. It compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence, the inspection of others. In doing so, it also enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate — and accountable.”